Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
appreciation for what the organization has experienced. This will give you
insight into people's attitudes about data warehousing. Are people fed up and
think that a data warehouse will never work for your company? Perhaps the
company experienced some early success and everyone is clamoring for more.
If there are deep-seated problems with data, and business analysis is not
highly valued, then you are likely to face serious challenges building a data
warehouse. This does not mean that you should stop; it just means that you
need to address these fundamental issues at the same time and not expect
the data warehouse project itself to fix problems that have been building
for decades. Specific activities must be planned to address these overarching
issues. The data warehouse can be a catalyst for changing how the organization
uses and values data.
Understanding Your Existing Reporting
Environment
Now that you have taken a step back to survey the big picture, it is time to
get your arms around how reporting is being done today. Many reports are
generated from some sort of reporting system, which may or may not be a
data warehouse. The objective here is three-fold:
Find the reporting environments.
Learn about the data that is available via that environment.
Identify the technology used by that environment.
Each of these steps is described in more detail in this section. One or two
people from IT or the business community can do this work. While some of the
information to be collected is technical, the people gathering the information
do not need to have deep technical skills. This should be done by someone
who is very organized and persistent, often a senior business analyst, a project
manager, or a senior systems analyst. The effort to dig deeper into the current
reporting environment can span the enterprise or may be focused in only one
area, such as sales or finance.
If the work is to collect information across the enterprise, then the people
doing this work must be authorized and empowered by enterprise man-
agement. This gives the team the authority to cross division or department
boundaries. The purpose is to get a basic understanding of the big reporting
systems or data warehouses across the enterprise. At the enterprise level, the
work described in this chapter can be completed in several weeks. This type
of effort will not be able to identify every set of personal spreadsheets that are
used for reporting, but should be able to touch on those environments that
produce the most critical reports for the organization.
